On 12/10/26 09:20, Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues wrote:
you know that chdist exists? And chdist even has support for "chdist aptitude".
Yes, I know chdist exists.
My problem with it is the same problem I had with sbuild/cowdancer:
it wants me to create state directories in advance, and then maintain them.
So inevitably that ends up consuming 200-300MB of nvram permanently (per
release, per arch), and
I then forget where I left the state directories, or
I get stale answers because I haven't run "apt update" there recently
enough, and
nothing warns me "hey watch out, last apt update of this chdist was 22
months ago".
(I just re-checked and as at chdist=2.26.11~bpo13+1,
"chdist forky aptitude -u" wrongly demands root privileges, so
it'd have to be "chdist forky apt update && chdist forky aptitude".
I think hitting that last time was when I said "I give up, chdist is not
for me".)
When building OS images, when building debs, and when just looking at
aptitude,
it is a much better fit for me to say "mmdebstrap, create exactly what I
need, ab initio, no stale/old baggage".
Usually on a single line of bash history.
(And yes I often have an apt-cacher-ng somewhere on the network, but it
auto-expires stuff, at its own cadence, and mmdebstrap still works if I
omit it.)
I could create a wrapper script around chdist to do this, but it'd be
uglier and involve more steps than using mmdebstrap.
